


Sea Wife.

by laufey



Category: A Redtail's Dream (Webcomic), Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 22:50:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10626774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laufey/pseuds/laufey
Summary: Time is like the water,and the water is cold and deeplike my own consciousness.And time is like a picture,which is painted of water,half of it by me.And time and the waterflow trackless to extinctioninto my own consciousness.~Steinn Steinarr





	

Sun shining through the water makes the sand bottom below a patchwork of golden light. She turns her head to look around and a stream of bubbles escapes from the corner of her mouth, all of a sudden she knows she's here for something important... but what that would be, Åsa never finds out. She wakes up at this point.

The dream is usually always the same, though it seems that the weather varies a little. Once, when she's fifteen, the lake seems to be iced over and she panics for a moment when she realizes there's no way to the surface. Except - except there is, and she remembers where it is, somehow. She flips around and the ease and gracefulness surprise her, how the water glides past her, quickly, as if she were flying through it. Strange, she thinks, I don't swim this well. She's just going through a growth burst that makes her legs ache so bad she cries in the evenings and her every move seems to accidentally knock something on the floor, but now for a short moment the dark winter waters part in front of her, like her body were suddenly agile and strong.

***

Ten years later she's swimming in the lake again. The sun is shining and the bottom of the lake is far, curiously far below, she can't even see it this time. She turns her head to look around, a stream of bubbles escapes from the corner of her mouth, and suddenly something heavy falls over her. Åsa doesn't care, she'll soon wake up. This is but an ordinary fishing net, and though it's tangling around her, forcing her hands against her sides, it won't harm her. Dreams aren't real after all. She tugs at the net for a bit of fun and it tugs back at her, changing its course and pulling her up along with it. Åsa watches her flippers, seeing them for the first time properly now that the net is forcing her thick body _(Thick? But I'm thin as a rake. A stick figure, a bean stalk, gaunt, sickly, and so forth.)_ into an uncomfortable curve, wondering how she didn't realize she was a seal all this time.

Isn't it time to wake up now, she asks aloud, but the water distorts her voice. There's more bubbles, the light grows brighter and colder, silver in colour rather than gold. Everything's unusually blue, unlike the almost colourless lake Saimaa. She pops onto the surface and gets slapped against the side of a boat a few times before she's lifted up along with the net.

Someone behind her makes a sound that carries with it all the frustration in the world. Åsa looks up and sees a young woman, about her own age perhaps, long, curly hair tied into a loose braid, brown, oiled leather clothes like fishermen usually wear. She says something, more to herself than Åsa, and although the language sounds weird Åsa manages to understand the gist of it: "Guess I'll eat you instead, then".

"No?" she squeaks, and the other woman falls silent. Then she tries to laugh a bit, ha ha, and pulls out a knife. "NO!" Åsa repeats although talking is suddenly harder than it should be. She shakes her head and the weirdest sensation takes over her, a feeling she can only describe as the skin on her head letting go of... the skin on her head. She wriggles, and the feeling spreads across her whole body until she feels the skin in front split open, not much, but enough for her to get one long, bony leg and one arm out of the seal skin.

The other woman has sat down and though she looks like she's considering jumping off her own boat she at least seems convinced to not make a meal out of her. Åsa pushes the seal skin off her face and over her head, and does her best to untangle. After a moment the other woman stands up again, hoists the net and its contents completely onto the boat and begins to cut her free.

Waves lap at the sides of the boat and the sky is pale blue and impossibly wide. No matter how she tries to look Åsa cannot see a single tree anywhere, the landscape is dramatic, full of tall mountains, and her skin feels very much unlike it does after a swim in a Finnish lake. The other woman - Ása - finishes tying the boat to a pier and reaches out a hand. She grabs it and climbs out of the ship, feeling the rough cement bite into the soles of her feet. She tiptoes gingerly after her new, well, friend for lack of better term, holding the skin around herself, because right now that and one Icelandic sweater is all that's shielding her against the freezing sea winds.

Ása turns and asks something that just sounds like blablabla? with a concerned tone. Åsa shrugs back, she can only understand Icelandic for those parts where it sounds like Swedish, and that's not often. Ása points at her bare feet and asks something again, but even if she understood that, what could she answer? It's ok, I'm used to walking around barefoot, she finally says. Ása of course does not seem to understand.

_(I should probably be waking up already. Shouldn't I?)_

Turns out Ása lives in a small, concrete house. Something about the way it looks like makes Åsa feel uneasy; she pulls the seal skin over her head and looks through its eyes, and realizes what's so odd. The house looks much too worn. Concrete has only been available for a few years, or, she corrects herself, it's only been affordable enough for everyday people for that long. It's a fancy, new material, easy to build with, fire safe and fashionable, but Ása's home somehow seems like it were a hundred years old, crumbling a little here and there, paint chipping off the sides of the windows. Besides, weren't Icelanders supposed to live in turf houses? She thinks she learned about it at school.

Another gust of wind chills her to the bone and she quickly decides idle thoughts are useless. It's probably the weather eating through buildings faster in Iceland or something, and with that she scales the stairs in two clumsy hops and almost tackles Ása through the door. It's pleasantly warm here, not at all like a house waiting for its owner to return, she closes the coldness outside with determination. The moment the lock clicks behind her her arms are full of Ása, her mouth on hers, her arms around her waist. I hope I'm not waking up yet, she thinks, letting the seal skin fall on the floor, I could... I could live here.

***

Her skin always tastes of salt, it's like this Icelandic girl spends all her time at sea - and maybe she does, Åsa doesn't ask. She's enviably round and curvy, shorter than Åsa but not by much, wild, sea breeze frizzy hair getting everywhere. She likes to grab a handful of it, pull it back, and watch how, for a split second, Ása's head falls back and she leans against her, mouth slightly open, eyes half-lidded and already clouding over a little. She looks helpless, like Åsa could do anything she wants and she wouldn't be able to resist her.

She presses her leg between hers, almost forcing them apart, pushing her hand down the front of her pants. There's a sense of urgency because what if she wakes up, what if she'll have to wait for ages for this dream to return. Ása seems to share that feeling. She's already so wet that Åsa only needs to rub her fingers against her a few times before slipping in (she loves hearing her breath hitch a little when she enters her), she falls on her knees and feels her own seal furs rough against her bare skin. She holds back a little, spreads Ása open and blows on her slowly, smiling a little when she feels her shiver and mutter something with her voice breaking to the end. Nothing polite, she guesses, and gives her a tiniest, slowest little kiss. More untranslatables from Ása, which cut away when she presses her face firmly onto her crotch and starts to lick, fast, deep, desperate, she knows this will be stolen from her any moment and she's so hungry for her -

***

Sun shining through the water makes little pillars of pale blue that gradually grow darker before disappearing into the depths. She turns her head to look around and a stream of bubbles escapes from the corner of her mouth. A few strong kicks take her to the surface where she looks around again, remembering this is usually the time she wakes up.

_Not always though. Not if she's lucky._

She swims quietly to the shore and shakes herself to get the skin to fall off, wrapping it up in a tight bundle. It's late at night, or possibly early in the morning, the sunlit northern summer nights are hard to read. Ása already knows the house and could walk the path there with her eyes closed. Good thing everyone's asleep, she thinks, it's always a little awkward to walk around naked.

The door clicks behind her, she lets the skin fall on the floor and climbs the steep, narrow ladder upstairs as quietly as she can. She steps on a ball of yarn and almost falls over, holds her breath and listens. Watches. After a while she continues, now careful to not stumble on the brightly coloured yarns that lie here and there like some fluffy, gigantic mice. Ása's as untidy as ever, she muses, and her stock of yarn seems to grow year by year.

It's been quite a long time now hasn't it? This year she'll turn fifty and Ása's already there, being a few years older than her. Sometimes it feels like it could almost be real. At other times she remembers how it's all her own imagination. There's strange apparatuses she's never seen before, stories of monsters and a horrible illness that has ended the world, Ása's tales of battling monsters at sea and running a chocolate smuggling business from Iceland to Norway. Still, it's her dream. Her dream wife in her dream house, all her own.

  
_"The stories about selkies always say you should take their skin and hide it away. Then they won't be able to return to the sea."_

_"Are you going to?"_

_"I want to."_

_In this memory Ása is quiet for a moment before she continues: "But I won't, I won't. It's better if you come to me because you want to see me, so I'll wait. I'm good at waiting. I'll wait for as long as it takes."_

  
Åsa clears the last of the distance in a few quiet steps and grabs the side of a quilt. Ása doesn't wear clothes to bed, she never did... she knows what she'll taste like, she knows how she'll move against her, she knows how she's going to sound like. Why, Åsa adds to herself, she can even guess what Ása's going to say! In one fluid move she slips underneath the covers, well aware of how cold her skin is after a swim in the ocean, sticking her fingers into her ears as she lands on Ása's sleep warm belly. After all, she doesn't want to wake up herself at this point.


End file.
